Step 1: Look at the Big Players in the niche. What color scheme do they use? Chances are good they they may have even invested in market research to determine the best color scheme for the market, and you can piggy back on that research

Step 2: Use ColorSchemeDesigner.com to find complimentary colors

Step 3: Use CheapHeader.info to get a good looking header for $5

Good luck with your site design!

- D

Special thanks to my son Dylan for adding his unique ‘signature’ to the this video towards the end! I promise he was being taken care of, just not happy about bed time I also ending up ditching the mic audio and just using the camera audio, so there was more sound captured than I anticipated.

Resources mentioned:

Aweber Email Marketing Service
AffiloJetpack Content

I spend entirely too much time thinking about it, and nowhere near enough time working on it. I’ve always thought a lot my online activities, but in the last few weeks it’s become too much of a preoccupation.

I’m supporting a family, moving to a new house in March, and my job is exceptionally demanding right now.

Because of everything going on right now, I can’t commit to keep these updates going. I think about them too much, and it eats up valuable time and energy that I need to devote to my job right now.

While the act of actually writing and posting weekly updates is not a big deal, the mental energy it takes from me, is, for some reason, very draining. I simply have to devote that energy elsewhere at this point in my life.

I will still continue to blog, do interviews, and make videos here at DevinElder.com, but it has to be on a more  flexible basis. I look forward to posting tons more content here for years to come, it just can’t be in the form of weekly updates anymore

– Niels Henrik David Bohr

I remember reading this quote some time back, and it really had an impact on me. It seems like most people are really scared of taking chances because they are afraid of failure. I don’t like failure, but it’s taught me more than any of my successes. If I look back on my life to the things I’m very happy about, many of them happened because I pushed through some kind of fear.

Now on to more practical things… I made this video to talk about 9 Internet Marketing Mistakes I’ve made, and what you can learn from them. I hope this video helps save you time and money in your own journey online.

BTW, I’ve made way more than 9 mistakes, and yes, I sure do love Chick fil A!

There’s an awesome entrepreneur by the name of Dan Sullivan, who runs a program called Strategic Coach. I have not taken this course, but my older brother does, and we discuss the concepts taught in Strategic Coach regularly.

I’d like to explain one concept that has really helped me out, with apologies to Mr. Sullivan for what will most likely be a misguided butchery of the concept

Where You Focus

There are essentially two places people focus when measuring themselves and their work, two reference points.

1) Future Goals (horizon)

2) Past Accomplishments

What creates friction and self doubt for us is measuring ourselves against the impossible ‘horizon’ we’ve set out for ourselves. In truth, goals are like a horizon in that the do not really exist, and never will. The mental construct you have about your perfect goals is a fantasy, and will never really come true. Also, as you approach the horizon, it keeps moving further away.

Not much fun!

What causes gratitude, a feeling of accomplishment, and energy to do more is measuring yourself against what you’ve already accomplished.

While I feel very unsatisfied when I measure myself against a $10,000/month goal, I feel very grateful and happy when I measure how much I’ve accomplished in the last six months.

New Link Building Service

I’ve added a link building services section to this website. Link building is hard and tedious, but I’ve got a great team in place doing that for me now, and I’m extending that service to readers. It’s designed for someone that doesn’t want to get their hands dirty at all with link building.

I call it ‘pushbutton’ because that really is what the service involves from an end user’s perspective.

You buy a package, give me your keywords and URL, and a few weeks later you get a report of where all your links are. I’m excited to offer a service for the first time one this blog, and I think it will lead the way for more services in the future. It’s not passive income, but if I make a transition to full time entrepreneurship at some point I would like to offer lots of services. It can be fun/rewarding to actually interact with people instead of just checking stats in Aweber and Clickbank

Challenges & Opportunities

Quality Content - I’ve got a lot of so-so content on my niche sites, which I have to go in and manually edit as the pages climb to the first page of Google. The strategy of getting cheap articles written has allowed me to get a lot of content online and climbing the ranks, it just leaves a lot of work to be done in the form of editing. Finding good writers is truly one of the core challenges of this business.

Lack of Funding and Time – At this point, I’m basically out of money to invest in my business. I spent a good deal on articles, software, and experiments in the last 6 months, and now I’ve got to tighten the belt a bit and focus on revenue generating activities that I can do myself. I also have lots of ‘cleaning up’ to do, so that’s where my focus will be for the next few months.

I’m glad I invested some money upfront in my business, and if I completely left the business alone it would all be recouped in a few months. I got a chance to purchase some great software and run lots of experiments. Both of those are critical for this business.

Google Algorithm Changes & A Renewed Focus on List Building

I have quite a few websites, some are pretty new, some are older. Apparently, Google did a recent algorithm change that wiped some people’s sites from the SERPs. I was lucky in that only one of my sites was affected, but it really highlights the danger of basing a business on SEO rankings. I’m not trying to be alarmist, and this is really no surprise, but it does validate list building even more for me.

The Only Site of Mine Affected by the February 2011 Google Algorithm Change:

The answer? Build the up the email lists more!

Lots of things will change in the next few years:

• social networks will come and go
• GPU computing will vastly change the way apps are developed for the web
• phones will get faster and better

BUT, people will have email for a long time to come. By taking the marketing ‘offline’ and providing value to people through their email, you insulate yourself from all of these changes to a certain degree.

My recent interview with Steve Scott has me thinking about my SEO strategy in general. I’ve always had the idea that I need to build a big content website that attracts visitors through SEO rankings, then converts those visitors into subscribers.

Now I’m thinking that the content site is an extra step, and is making things harder. It makes me want to skip the website altogether and focus strictly on driving traffic to squeeze pages.

I’m going to experiment with Youtube and article marketing that points directly to a squeeze page. Youtube gets insane amounts of traffic, as do article directories like EzineArticles. I’ve got some ideas for creating a ton of video content in the guitar niche, and I may share those videos here soon.

I think that by creating great content on both Youtube and article marketing platforms, and using some link building to promote those pages, I can get some good subscribers coming in across all my sites. I’ll keep you posted on the progress with this tactic.

Newsletter Subscriber Update

I broke the 1,000 subscriber mark, which was a neat milestone for me. My next big milestone I’ve set up for myself is 10,000. I think getting to 10,000 subscribers will be much easier than getting that first 1,000. I also think that 10k subscribers will yield some pretty regular affiliate income, basically on autopilot.

Clickbank Sales

There has been some activity, but isn’t it funny how the sales seem to clump together? I wonder why that happens…

Have an excellent weekend, and try to remember to measure yourself against what you’ve already accomplished, not what you have yet to accomplish.

In this interview, I’m very happy to bring you some excellent insights from Steve Scott of SteveScottSite.com. Steve is an expert in building lists and email marketing, and makes a nice full time income running his internet business – often working from all over the globe.

Recently, Steve brought in nearly $4,000 in commissions in one day from sending literally just a few emails to his list. Obviously, the hard work of building the list was done over a long period of time, but Steve’s near 4k day does illustrate the power of the list.

I really enjoyed this interview because I got to ask Steve all the questions that have been on my mind regarding email marketing. If you’re considering email marketing, or you already are and want better results, you will definitely get some good ideas from this interview!

Resources mentioned:

• Steve Scott’s Website
• Steve Scott’s Youtube Channel
• Aweber
• ‘Lead Magnet’ example Steve uses

As has been the case the last few weeks, I have not been doing much of anything on my sites. My VA, as always, has been creating tons of backlinks to my sites, and that’s all the work that’s happening right now.

This week I had a *really good* interview with an internet marketer named Steve Scott, and I really look forward to publishing that video interview on Monday.

Email Marketing Strategy

Since email marketing is the core of my whole business strategy, I got to ask Steve all kinds of questions about email marketing, which he is very successful with.

One of the things that I was glad to debunk was the “each subscriber is worth $1 per month” myth. You may have heard that a rule of thumb for email marketing is that each subscriber you have will be worth, on average, $1 per month. This is simply not true, and I’m going to have reset my expectations since that helps me decide how much money to invest in my business.

Now, a list of  buyers may be worth $1 each per month, but it’s certainly not the case with a general list of folks who have opted in straight from your website.

What I mean by a list of buyers is that you have a list of people that have already bought something in this niche you’re operating in. One of the reasons people offer you 75% commission on Clickbank is that you are essentially building a list of buyers for them, which is far more profitable than a regular list of folks who have opted in. This makes sense, as someone who’s already bought an info product on a certain topic is more likely to buy another one.

Aweber Stats

I’ve certainly changed my assumptions about the value of subscribers. So, while 10,000 or 20,000 subscribers may have seemed like a crazy number to me a few months ago, that’s really the range that I need to be in this year. Right now I’m averaging 15-20 new subscribers per day, and I have pretty low traffic numbers across all my sites (most sites under 75 visitors/day at this point). If I can get my sites to 1,000 unique visitors per day, I’ll easily be getting 300 new subscribers per day. With that kind of traffic, it’s easily imaginable that I can build a list of 100,000 people in the next 2 years.

Clickbank Stats

A few sales this week, which is nice since I have a full time VA to pay. The key is to get to a point where the sites are making consistent sales, since almost any site can have one off sale every now and then.

The key to consistent sales is simply getting more subscribers in the ‘sales funnel’ up front and letting the autoresponder do the rest. So, everything at this point revolves around getting more links > more traffic > more leads > more sales. Pretty simple :-)

Have a great weekend & count your blessings. Stay tuned for an awesome video interview I have lined up for Monday!

However, my full time virtual assistant has been working 40 hours per week on building backlinks. I’ve been having some issues with Article Marketing Robot being a little buggy, so that has slowed down the link building process a bit, but overall things are progressing well.

Ranking Progress

I’m happy to say that I’m on page one of Google for my main keyword for 6 of my sites. The main keyword for the site is usually in the domain name, and usually has a high amount of traffic associated with it.

Being on page 1 doesn’t really bring that much traffic, so getting to #1 is the goal. You may have heard that the #1 spot, on average, gets about 40% of the traffic, and the #2 spot gets 12%, and it dives from there.

Based on my back linking strategy and good content, I’m confident I’ll get to #1 for all my terms. One thing I believe has helped with my rankings is going back in to my pages and adding more content to them to make them the absolute best page for the chosen keyword.

For example, I may have a 500 word article of decent quality that I outsourced. Then after a month or two, that article shows up on page 1 of Google. What I’ll typically do, if I have time, is go back to that article and really flesh it out and make it outstanding. This is much easier to do than writing an article from scratch, and it’s motivating to edit when you know you’re already on the first page and gunning for the #1 spot.

This was my approach to almost all my content, as I could not have possibly written all the content for 10 sites by myself from scratch.

Aweber

Approaching the 1,000 subscriber mark. As I’ve mentioned, the lists are not converting to sales as regularly as I’d like, but I am getting more subscribers than I thought for the relatively low levels of traffic my sites are seeing (between 20 visitors/day and 400 visitors/day depending on the site).

So, getting to 100 new subscribers per day within the next few months should be a pretty attainable goal. If I can get to 1,000 unique visitors per day on each of my 10 sites, I should be able to get 300 new subscribers each day no problem. Slowly but surely…

Clickbank

Pretty slow at Clickbank, you just never know what’s going through people’s minds when they visit your site. The answer is to just drive more traffic and ramp of the subscribers, it’ll get there.

As always, have an excellent weekend!

I’m doing some of the link building using Article Marketing Robot and other tools, and my VA is doing the rest. Slowly but surely…

Aweber

I actually completely killed one of the lists for a terrible site I had started awhile back. The domain expired, and I happily let that site slip out of my portfolio. There were about 18 subscribers on that list that are now erased. I won’t hit 1,000 subscribers this month like I had wanted, but that was a completely arbitrary number anyway, and I’ll get there in the next few days. Aweber is now charging me $29 per month, and that price point is good up to 2,500 subscribers. I hope to break the 2,500 subscriber mark by the end of March.

Clickbank

Many days of silence followed by 4 sale days in a row. I’ve been playing around with different offers, and that hurt my sales quite a bit in the last few weeks. It was a risk I’m worth taking, as the potential upside of finding better converting offers was worth it to me.

However, I switched back to my orignal offers on one site and saw a few immediate sales. Tweaking and testing is just part of the business, and at this point I’m still willing to experiment.

As always, have a great weekend!

In this case, my online business is just not doing the numbers I want it to. However, the link building continues, and that’s really all that stands between where I am now and more traffic and profits. What I mean is that the content, design, and autoresponder sequences are all set up, it’s simply a matter of getting better rankings and more traffic.

As for other parts of my life – we’re buying a new house, and I just got a new job at my company.

Either of those events on their own is pretty big, pretty exciting, and pretty stressful. We finally got our house under contract today, and it looks like things are moving forward. This ain’t no seller’s market, I’ll tell you that, but we’re getting an awesome deal on the buying end so it works out.  As for my job, it’s in the IT industry working on some pretty cutting edge stuff, and the learning curve is steep.

I’m very happy about both the new house and the new job, but it’s left -zero- time for business building, and I came to a conclusion – I am going to start training my VA to handle all aspects of my link building.

At the end of this year long journey, I may compile everything into an eBook and call it “How to Build an Online Business While Working and Supporting a Family.” I know there are plenty of people in this situation, and you really have to get your priorities and your time management straight! I am very grateful to have both my business and my job, however.

Training My Virtual Assistant

This week, I had some good Skype conversations with my virtual assistant, Rashid. He’s been building links for me nearly full time for awhile now. He usually works 25 to 35 hours a week. It’s been good, and pretty effective, but I’m ready to give him more responsibility.

I’ve loaded up three important pieces of software on a remote server I have, and I’ve given my VA login credentials and training videos for the software. He’s currently learning to use Article Marketing Robot, the Best Spinner, and Sick Submitter.

It was a bit of a leap of faith to turn over my server like that, but we’ve been working together for some time now. We’ve had probably 35 Skype conversations, and he’s always been very helpful and upfront. The bottom line is that I *really* want to have him take over my entire link building operation, and I’m just going to have to let go of the reins a bit in order for that to happen.

That’s the way business scales, you hire people. Why do soloprenuers fight that concept so much? Could I do a better job myself? Sure, at first I could, but I don’t have any time, so doing it myself is really not an option.

I’ve heard John Jonas talk about letting go of perfectionism and being ok with the job just getting done. I’m trying to embrace more of that.

So, that’s where I’m currently at with my link building. I’m very relieved and very excited about it.

Aweber

I’m little behind pace for getting to 1,000 subscribers this month, but I’ve been pretty happy with my low unsubscribe rates. Truthfully, these lists are not generating as many sales as I’d like, but I do believe that it’s much better to have multiple opportunities at a sale than just a website visit. Also, the content on all my lists is top-notch, about 90% information and 10% selling. I’m not sure I could improve much on that.

Clickbank

Whew, sometimes I wish I didn’t force myself to do these screenshots… what a week. But, this is part of keeping me accountable and honest, and I promised I would do 52 of these, so here we are

As always, have a great weekend!